Letters to the Editors Archive

In my overview of the 2003 Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Issue 29, Nov-Dec 2003), I put out a call for further research on the Italian comic Marcel Perez. Since the uploading of that piece, I discovered a series of invaluable articles by Steve Massa on Perez' American career: Steve Massa, “Tweedy's Tangled Tale”, Slapstick!, no. 6, 2002, pp 5–14; Steve Massa, “Alice Howell and Marcel Perez Update”, Slapstick!, no. 7, 2002, pp 5–6; Steve Massa, “George Rowe/Marcel Perez/Alice Howell Update”, Slapstick!, no. 9, 2004, pp 19–21. These are essential for an understanding of Perez' role in post World War I silent comedy; his research is to be commended.

Regarding Maximilian Le Cain's observation on Haneke's Funny Games, it is obvious that he has not understood the film at all. The film is NOT on the struggling family's side, but uses them as figurines for a ruling class that deserves their own downfall. If you watch the film closely, you will see that for every stroke dealt to the family, a piece of upper class oppression, arrogance or cold egotism on their side has preceded it. It is not fair or psychologically believable, nor is it meant to be. It is a question of a symbolical drama, the ultimate consequence of a cold-blooded analysis of who really deserves to die, horrifying and thrilling to any person with left-wing sympathies at all.

Thank you very much for taking the trouble to offer some feedback on my (mis?)reading of Funny Games. It certainly makes me curious to go back and watch the film yet again. Perhaps indeed there are dimensions that I have failed to identify. However, even in light of your criticisms, there is nothing that I would essentially alter in my critique – although perhaps further clarification of certain points would be desirable. Perhaps I glossed over it too quickly in haste to move on to the Haneke films that I like and preferred writing about.

Between Haneke's intention and achievement in this film, I agree with you in your summation as much as regards the former; my argument centred on the latter and with good reason. A major part of Haneke's greatness resides in his enviable skill at balancing the rigidity of geometrically determined narrative and formal structures with a profoundly generous and insightful grasp of the human beings that people them. He has shown himself able to eloquently express a whole variety of social and political concerns through his mastery of this difficult balance. That is his great skill and the success of each project that I discussed depends upon his ability to strike this balance. He is not simplistically preaching a message, but creating cinematic constructs that cause us, the viewers, to think and to analyse along with him. Therefore if the film should fail on a formal level – as, it seems to me, Funny Games does – there is the possibility of ideological distortion, something less gifted and courageous directors, content with mere didacticism, do not risk.

In a nutshell, Haneke erred by placing far too much emphasis on the framework and failed to sufficiently develop the human angle of his story, resulting in an aridly schematic diagram of a film. Of course there is nothing wrong with a filmmaker using characters as “figurines” to illustrate a point – it might be useful to bring to mind Pasolini's Theorem (1968) as a point of comparison – or to create psychologically unbelievable situations. However this is, as Funny Games demonstrates, not Haneke's strong point. My problem is not with his intention, but with his execution of the idea. Whereas Pasolini creates brilliant, archetypal figurines, Haneke's characters, although he “uses them as figurines” are not figurines. They are people and Haneke is far too generous to reduce them to figurines. Yet he doesn't characterise them well enough, either, and falls between two stools.

By – at least in view – miscalculating the visceral power of his Tom and Jerry gimmicks and not providing us with enough emotional connection with and understanding of the victims, his film ends up “on the struggling family's side” in spite of itself. This might not have happened if they really were figurines – a la Pasolini – or if we were provided with insights into their moral deficiencies as people (as opposed to class-caricature figurines), in the manner of Chabrol's La Ceremonie or Scorsese's Cape Fear. As it is, I can't help feeling that Funny Games actually ends up by inadvertently playing into the hands of the right.

Also, it must be noted that at least as important as the problem of class relations in Funny Games is its questioning of spectatorship, which you don't allude to at all. The heavy handed naiveté of these not-very-funny games with the audience – especially when compared to the dazzling, boldly incisive analyses of image creation and consumption in 71 Fragments and Benny's Video – contributes enormously to the film's failure. It is through the faulty mechanism of his questioning of spectatorship that his political intentions as outlined by you must inevitably pass and, in so doing, become mangled out of shape.

Thank you for giving such an extensive answer to my comment. I truly appreciate a discussion which I now believe is down to the simple level of “I like the film” and “I don't”. Personally, I feel a thrilling and chilling arousal firstly particularly when confronted with characters who seem to be flesh and blood and yet simultaneously apparent creations of somebody's mind. Secondly when confronted with my own cold voyeurism in the bloody confrontation with these class-caricature figurines, who I have spent much of my life hating. What would I do if they were really up against the wall? Not real people – that's too easy, too evident – of course I couldn't kill a real human being – but my fantasies. That's why the film hit me and others too, that I know, particularly perhaps with a history of extreme leftist views.

I was interested to read Maria San Filippo's article on Deneuve. The article disappointingly contains little new material and very few up-to-date references. It also makes the misleading claim that there is a dearth of serious critical material on her. Your readers might like to know that there is in fact a substantial body of serious scholarly work on Deneuve, both in English and in French. In the latter, a whole issue of the journal Tausend Augen (2001), and in English, among others, my chapter in my book Stars and Stardom in French Cinema (London: Continuum, 2000), which also contains a more complete bibliography.

I am grateful to Ginette Vincendeau for her comments regarding my essay on Catherine Deneuve. While her suggestions regarding recent scholarship on Deneuve are appreciated, I wish to emphasize that my piece was conceived as a personal reflection on and interpretation of selected filmic texts from the Deneuve canon rather than as a comprehensive meta-critical analysis of Deneuve scholarship. Though I maintain my assertion that Deneuve has overall been underserved by critical scholarship, I gladly acknowledge the contributions of Vincendeau and others in giving this accomplished performer her just due.

I am writing in regards to your review of the 3rd Annual Melbourne Underground Film Festival in Senses of Cinema, Issue 22 Sept–Oct 2002. In particular, I am writing about three films directed by James Fotopoulos, which MUFF booked from Facets Multi-Media of Chicago. The specific films are Back Against The Wall, Migrating Forms, and ZERO.

“Apparently the video quality was too poor to screen, but what makes matters worse is that all of the Fotopoulos films at MUFF were video copies and apparently Fotopoulos makes a point to screen his films in 16mm.”

16mm prints of these titles are available for booking, and I offered them to the MUFF booker. But that did not work out. After conferring with Mr. Fotopoulos, a compensation was made for the films to screen on VHS. This was principally in order to share the films with the Australian audience in some form. Whether the quality of the VHS was too poor to screen is, I think, debatable.

Furthermore, yes, it is true, ZERO, Migrating Forms, and Back Against The Wall were all made on 16mm and circulate in that format. But Fotopoulos has made a feature on DV, and shorts in many different formats. He has also made a feature partially on DV and partially on 16mm, which alternates screenings in both formats. He's not 16mm obsessed; 16mm is just a tool in his repertory. He recently bought a bizarre old Russian 35mm camera, and will soon be working in that format – though to what degree we'll see.

In her review of Laleen Jayamanne's Toward Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis, Therese Davis misrepresents Jayamanne's writing on my film The Good Woman of Bangkok.

Therese Davis writes, “I also remember Jayamanne's unexpected response to Dennis O'Rourke's controversial film The Good Woman of Bangkok on national radio”.

Therese Davis does not remember very well. If she did, she would know that it was in this conversation between Julie Rigg, Laleen Jayamanne and myself that I pointed out to Laleen what she had, up until that time, failed to see: that I was filming Aoi, while she was gazing at (and past) the image of herself in the mirror, and while she was aware of the presence of the filmmaker being constantly reflected there. I recall that I compared the image to those self-portraits of Frida Khalo when she painted her image reflected in the mirror suspended above her sick bed. In Laleen's essay, she alludes to this conversation.

Davis claims that “For example, she (Jayamanne) reveals that the close-up image of Aoi narrating her life story that constitutes nearly one third of the film is in fact a mirror image”.

Jayamanne reveals no such thing – there was no revelation waiting to be made. What Jayamanne does is write about the “mirror conversation”; and, as readers of her essay will understand, she comes to a different analytical position than the one ascribed to her by Davis.

Perhaps I could forgive Davis for her failed memory, but she is obliged to know and acknowledge that The Good Woman of Bangkok contains a scene where – in a wide shot of the hotel room and as a part of the mirror conversation – Aoi is depicted sitting, facing the mirror, with a video camera on a tripod in the foreground and a television monitor displaying the video recording of Aoi's face, as it is reflected by that mirror.

I suspect that it is Davis revealing something here, rather than Jayamanne; because Davis goes on to link to the mirror conversation Jayamanne's comments on a completely different scene in the film. Davis writes: “Turning this film on its head, Jayamanne's inventive response mimics Aoi's mode of behaviour: Jayamanne describes Aoi as 'an agile improvisor', able to invent playful answers to O'Rourke's predictable, 'numbing' questions.”

It is tiresome to have to repeat what should be self-evident; however, for the record, I believe that I must. As I wrote in the book The Filmmaker and The Prostitute (Berry, Hamilton and Jayamanne, eds, Power Publications, Sydney 1997), where Jayamanne's essay was originally published:

The primary narrative of The Good Woman of Bangkok was created so as to partially conform with, and refer to, the myths of earlier, mostly grand narratives – colonial, popular and literary (Puccini, “60 Minutes Reports on the Shocking Sex Trade” and the Emanuelle movies, if you like). However, I believe that the film escapes the limiting traditions of any “grand narrative” – by simultaneously and overtly believing and disbelieving in them. To this end, the film includes a character – “the film maker” – who reflects me and others of my race and class, gender and profession, but who is not me (the person who was/is me was/is very different; because every day and every night I had to make the film). Through the description of this character, I took the rhetorical but sincere position that “the film maker” was implicated and guilty along with the sex tourists...

In the transaction of meaning in a documentary film there is this de facto agreement – a “secret contract” between the author and the spectator – where it is accepted that the filmmaker is the heroic protagonist, as well as being a 'moral shield' for the spectator. This secret contract allows for a comfortable, disengaged, and highly moralistic (prurient?) reading of almost all documentary films. In The Good Woman of Bangkok, by deliberate acts of transgression and exposure (fictional and real), I contrived to expose the secret contract, and to collapse this insulating critical-distance which normally exists between the documentary filmmaker and his [sic –ed] audience.

In The Good Woman of Bangkok, the character of the filmmaker is at once abstracted to be an everyman [sic –ed] – a presence embodied in the gaze of the camera, a conscience or identity whose values the spectator is forced to wrestle with in the course of watching the film ...

Even as we detest them, we can recognise the hopelessness of the experience of these Western sex-tourists – characters in a film – metaphorically lost in their grotesque fantasies. Just as we can admire her Stoic heroism, we can recognise the contradictory forces at work in Aoi's portrayal of herself, and we can sense that her motivations and desires are not completely revealed by what she says. We can sense the malevolence of the Patpong streets, the bars, the Rose Hotel; we can recognise the imperfections of “the film maker” character in his naive, imperialistic and morally impossible stances; and we can recognise something about ourselves. This last act of recognition is surely the most painful. (Especially, it seems, for professional critics!)

I am always amazed when so-called “professional” critics make conclusive statements about my filmmaking “ethics”, or my moral flaws, by citing statements or events in the film – scenes which only I could have decided to include. They do so to support their simplistic ideas about representation (and to assert their moral superiority) – all the while ignoring that it was my powerful decision to create and include the material to which they refer. A scene where Aoi complains or shoots a dirty glance at the camera is all they need to condemn the whole project. Would they have been so perspicacious if I had left all these constructed references to myself and to the process of filmmaking on the cutting-room floor?

In this context, my so-called “predictable, numbing questions” were not, in fact, the words spoken by me at the time of filming. In the editing process, I removed the less emphatic questions, and replaced them with the words that I wished “the filmmaker” to speak, so as to create the very effect and impression of Aoi that both Davis and Jayamanne delight in.

Mimesis it is not. In this clearly labelled “Documentary Fiction Film” everything is mediated – by me. Can't these “Knowing Critics” accept that they can only know Aoi – as a character in a film – through my agency and intervention? Aoi is “the good woman of Bangkok” and Aoi was/is an extraordinary and beautiful person; but she did not make the film.

Here's the thing: Dennis O'Rourke is unable to accept that some of us are interested in his films, that we may even like his films, for reasons other than he intended.

I accept O'Rourke's criticism of my memory. But I think it is unfortunate that he reduces my argument about mimetic strategies in Jayamanne's writing on film to a banal point about identification. I am not suggesting that Jayamanne identifies with Aoi. Rather, what interests me is a similarity between what Jayamanne describes as Aoi's mode of improvisation seen throughout the film and Jayamanne's mode of writing. In this sense I stand by my claim that Jayamanne's piece does reveal something new about the film in the sense that it opens up complex and ambiguous relations in the film. It gets people to see something they hadn't seen or hadn't understood, to see an image differently from how the director may have intended us to see it. And, as I suggested in my review, as with all good film criticism, the strength of Jayamanne's work is that it enables us to see things differently, to re-view the film in our heads.

For this reason I think that it is indeed “tiresome”, to use O' Rourke's term, that he uses my review of Jayamanne's book as yet another opportunity to rehearse his views on the The Good Woman of Bangkok. I've read O'Rourke's views. I think they are of interest. But I do not, as O' Rourke seems to believe, think that he is in possession of the truth on the matter.

Letters Archive